The Atlantis Guard

by S. A. Beck

  Chapter 16

  AUGUST 17, 2016, A VILLAGE ON THE HIGHWAY 25 MILES EAST OF TIMBUKTU

  NOON

  * * *

  Jaxon had never felt so much pain in her entire life.

  It had been two days since the fight, two days since Brett had come back from the dead only to be taken from her a second time. Two days of misery.

  All the guilt of his disappearance and supposed death back in Los Angeles came back at her tenfold. This time it really was her fault. She still couldn’t make sense of it. He had attacked her, and she’d had to defend herself. Vivian and Grunt had shot him to save her. They had all done what they had needed to do. But she couldn’t get around the fact that if she hadn’t followed Vivian into that Russian hideout, Brett might be still alive today.

  The Atlantis Allegiance had spent the past two days camping in a remote part of the desert. Jaxon had lain in her tent, hardly speaking with anyone. Otto had been kind, supportive, but what could he do to take this pain away? The others had kept their distance. She couldn’t even look at the mercenaries, not after what they had done. The scientists had been busy in their little lab.

  They’d gotten their results that morning.

  “The findings are quite clear,” Yuhle said, his face so close to his laptop that his nose almost touched the screen. He’d broken his last pair of glasses in the fight. “Brett’s blood shows Atlantean traits. He has normal DNA, but all other factors are well within Atlantean parameters. He was a human–Atlantean hybrid.”

  Jaxon felt ill. General Meade had turned her friend into a lab rat.

  “How?” Otto asked.

  The geneticists shrugged.

  “A very advanced technique,” Yamazaki said. “We don’t have the resources to even begin to analyze it.”

  “He’s creating an army, isn’t he?” Otto said. “He wants an army of Atlanteans.”

  “Damn,” Grunt muttered. “A regiment of those could raise some serious hell.”

  “This is what we feared all along,” Vivian said. “Meade has gone completely rogue. I don’t think he’s doing this for the Pentagon or anyone up the chain of command. I think he’s doing it for himself.”

  “That’s certainly the impression we got while we worked for him,” Dr. Yamazaki said. “That’s why we left and formed the Atlantis Allegiance in the first place.” She sighed and went on. “I guess all this time, I was hoping we were wrong.”

  Jaxon pulled herself out of her black thoughts long enough to ask, “Why would he do this?”

  Everyone paused and looked at each other.

  “A coup?” Grunt suggested.

  “What? You mean like take over the United States?” Jaxon said.

  The mercenary shrugged. “It’s the only explanation I can think of. Why else would he want a private army?”

  “The American people will never stand for it!” Otto said.

  “How could they resist, if Meade’s followers look like normal people but fight like superheroes?” Vivian said. “They won’t know who the enemy is. Did you see the blank look on Brett’s face? He was like a zombie.”

  Vivian visibly tensed as she realized she had said the wrong thing. She stole a guilty glance at Jaxon, who turned away.

  “We need to get in contact with the Atlantean community back in Timbuktu and warn them,” Jaxon said.

  Otto shook his head. “We can’t go back there. It’s too risky.”

  Jaxon sighed. He was right. As much as she wanted to be comforted by her people right now, as much as she’d like to sit in the griot’s front room and be surrounded by faces like hers, their enemies would be waiting for her back there.

  “We don’t have to,” Jaxon said. “We just need to get to a place where we can get a signal and I can call them.”

  “Where?” Otto asked.

  “There’s that highway that runs just north of the River Niger,” Jaxon said, pulling out a map of the region. “See how there’s a bunch of villages along it? We can go to one of them.”

  And so they did. With Dr. Yamazaki driving, Vivian and Jaxon drove into a little village on the highway about twenty-five miles east of Timbuktu. The rest of the team stayed in the desert just beyond sight of the town. While they all remembered Grunt’s warning about splitting up, they needed to be as inconspicuous as possible. The two Land Rovers stayed in constant contact via a pair of powerful walkie-talkies, which had a range of a couple of miles.

  The village was a cluster of maybe two hundred adobe and concrete buildings with a couple of little mosques and not much else. Even the mosques, usually so beautiful in this region, having been made of sculpted adobe with towering minarets, were in this place ugly concrete blocks with a little tower where tinny loudspeakers called the faithful to prayer. It seemed, as Jaxon looked at the mechanics’ shops and tire stores and cafés, that this place existed entirely for serving the truckers and buses going along the highway. There was certainly no agriculture. This village and the highway itself ran through the desert well north of the irrigated section fed by the river. The cracked and potholed streets were covered with a fine layer of sand. In this part of the world, farmland was too valuable to build on.

  They didn’t get a decent signal until they were near the center of town. In fact, they could see the mobile phone tower, a rusty metal contraption stuck on top of a three-story concrete building that looked like a block of offices. Dr. Yamazaki parked by a busy square nearby.

  “Make your calls and let’s get out of here, honey,” Vivian said, looking around nervously.

  Jaxon opened the door.

  “What are you doing?” Vivian asked.

  “Getting some privacy,” Jaxon snapped. She knew it was unfair to use that tone on her friend, who was only being careful, but she couldn’t get the image of Vivian shooting Brett out of her head.

  She closed the door behind her. Dr. Yamazaki rolled down her window.

  “It would be safer if you made the call from inside.”

  “I’ll just be a minute,” Jaxon replied, taking out her cell phone and walking away.

  “Uh-oh, there’s a cop car down the street,” Vivian called to her. “They’re coming this way.”

  Jaxon turned back toward the Land Rover.

  “Don’t do that, honey. I don’t want them to spot you too. Walk past like you don’t know us. They might be on the watch for us. We’ll circle around and pick you up in a minute.”

  “All right,” Jaxon replied, her heart beating fast.

  Dr. Yamazaki drove off at a slow speed so as not to look suspicious. Jaxon glanced at the police vehicle out of the corner of her eye. It was a blue pickup truck with a couple of Kalashnikov-toting cops sitting in the back and two more in the cab. They looked curiously at the Land Rover but didn’t seem to notice Jaxon at all.

  Jaxon bit her lip. Best not to push her luck. She was wearing that headscarf Otto had given her, making her look more like a local, but she still wore Western-style clothing. As casually as she could, holding the phone to her ear as if she were talking, she tried to merge with the pedestrians crossing to and fro on the square. She made for the nearest street, so she could get around the corner and out of sight.

  A few passersby stared at her, giving her the usual confused look the locals did when they saw one of the People of the Sea who didn’t dress like she was from Africa. She cursed herself for not getting proper clothes when she’d had the chance in Timbuktu.

  At least they didn’t try to talk with her since she had the phone up to her ear. And Jaxon thanked her luck that school was in session. That kept her from attracting a little crowd of children pestering her with questions. The cops would definitely notice that.

  Jaxon turned a little, putting her finger in her ear as if she was having trouble hearing the imaginary person on the phone. That gave her a chance to peek at the Land Rover, which was just moving out of sight.

  The police vehicle was following. In a heart-stopping moment, she clearly saw the driver pick up the mi
c for the truck’s radio and start talking.

  Jaxon got out of the square and hurried down a street and through a little market. Village women from the nearby river had come to sell produce. A little row of them sat in the meager shade of a row of tumbledown concrete buildings while they haggled with customers over the price of a variety of vegetables, grain, and baked bread.

  Jaxon stopped and dialed Salif’s number.

  “Jaxon? Where are you?” he asked when he picked up. He sounded worried.

  “We had some trouble with the Russians, and then some American agents too,” Jaxon said. “We saved Yuhle and Otto, though.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she lied. She didn’t feel all right and knew she wouldn’t for a long time.

  “Well, you certainly left a big mess behind you,” Salif growled.

  “What?”

  “The police have been here. They know that your group of foreigners were fighting the other group of foreigners, and they want to know why. Did you think the police never took note of you? And now that you have run away, they are asking all the People of the Sea questions. They have discovered how we brought the refugees from Ras el Ma, and now they are suspicious of our intentions. Jaxon, they might send them back over the border!”

  “What? They can’t do that! They’ll be taken to that camp.”

  “The police do not know about this. All they see is a group of Americans meddling with their politics and then getting into a gunfight with a group of Russians. They say the house was full of bodies. The Russian ambassador is coming up from Bamako!”

  “Oh no, this is terrible. I am so sorry.”

  “Sorry isn’t good enough,” Salif said, his anger audible through the crackly connection. “I warned you to be careful. I warned you there might be trouble, and now we have the government thinking we are in league with a violent foreign group. This is the very same thing the Mauritanian government said about our people before they put them in a prison camp. Do you want us sent away too?”

  “Salif, you know that was never my intention.”

  “Never mind your intention. You have brought disaster down on all of our heads! I tell you to be careful, I tell you not to bring attention to yourself, and you get in gunfights?”

  “We didn’t have a choice about that.”

  “And we may not have a choice to remain here.”

  Salif hung up.

  Jaxon looked around. People had heard her speaking in English, and she had attracted some attention. A man approached her with a welcoming smile. Jaxon pretended she didn’t notice him and walked quickly away. Her phone rang. The screen said it was Vivian.

  “You okay?” Jaxon asked.

  “If by okay you mean driving at eighty miles an hour through the desert with the cops hot on our tail, then yes, we’re okay.”

  She could hear thuds and bangs in the background as the Land Rover darted over rough terrain. The connection began to get crackly as they sped farther away from the cell phone tower.

  “Oh no!” Jaxon cried. “Can you hear me?”

  “What? Don’t worry. Yamazaki is an ace driver—” Vivian said something else that got lost in the static—“She lost those last cops, and she’ll lose these. You sit tight, and we’ll get back to you somehow. Go to—”

  The connection cut off.

  Jaxon paused in the middle of the street, unsure what to do. A donkey brushed by her. A couple of women tried to address her in Arabic, and she nodded and walked off.

  I’m attracting too much attention.

  She walked for a time and spotted a women’s clothing shop. While most women preferred to make their own clothes in Mali, one could buy cheap ready-made clothes. Jaxon hurried in to buy some loose robes that would make her look more like a local.

  That turned out to be a big mistake.

  “Welcome to my country!” said the teenaged daughter of the storeowner. “I took English in school. It is so good to be able to practice. Come, have some tea.”

  Getting stuck for a couple of hours of African hospitality was not what Jaxon had in mind.

  At least tea was in a back room, away from the prying eyes of the street. As Jaxon chatted with the girl, who was about her age, and through her talked with the girl’s mother, Jaxon wondered how much word was getting around that a foreigner who looked like one of the People of the Sea had come shopping for clothes. She figured in a small town like this, word traveled fast, but with it being right on the country’s major highway, maybe they were a bit more used to foreigners.

  She hoped.

  One glass of tea turned into two, and the shopkeepers chattered on and on, asking her endless questions about life in the United States. She made up a story about being a tourist visiting Timbuktu and having come out here to see what a smaller town looked like. They found that hilarious. “Not even we want to live here, and you come all the way from America to visit? Timbuktu is much more interesting.” After the third glass of tea and now feeling fully sugared up, Jaxon excused herself a couple of times to try and call Vivian, but she didn’t pick up. She tried Otto, too, in the other Land Rover, but he was out of range too.

  Finally she got around to business and managed to buy a loose robe that made her look more like a local. She also bought a colorful fabric bag to put her old Western clothes in.

  “You take the bus back to Timbuktu?” the daughter asked.

  “Um, yeah,” Jaxon said to sound convincing.

  “It stops on the next square. It should come soon, God willing.”

  “Thanks!”

  Jaxon headed that way to make her story of being a tourist look believable. The square lay close to the highway, visible through a gap in the buildings. Several trucks rumbled by. The plaza itself had several buses and minibuses parked in the center with the drivers shouting out their destinations.

  She turned away from the noise, pulled out her phone, and tried calling the other members of the Atlantis Allegiance. Still no luck. Then she dialed Hawa Ndiaye’s number.

  “Jaxon!” the Atlantean schoolteacher cried when she picked up. “Are you safe?”

  “Um, yeah,” Jaxon replied, not sure that she was. As she answered, she saw a police pickup truck pass slowly through the square. She didn’t think it was the same one that had gone off to chase Vivian and Yamazaki, but she couldn’t be sure. “What’s going on back there?”

  Hawa Ndiaye’s voice dropped to a frightened whisper. “The police came and asked me about you. They knew we spent time together. There are so few foreigners here that everyone knew your movements. Now they are saying you are a spy! They took my grandfather to the police station!”

  Jaxon’s hands trembled at the thought of that kindly old storyteller and historian being dragged off to be questioned.

  The police truck drove up the street Jaxon stood on. She turned her back on it, ready to run if she got spotted.

  She let out a sigh of relief when the police drove past without slowing.

  Her friend was still talking. “They are questioning everybody. They are going house to house. We haven’t had shooting in the street since Al-Qaeda got kicked out. Everyone is blaming our community for bringing war back to Timbuktu.”

  Jaxon winced. Her arrival had brought disaster to the very people she was trying to protect.

  “What can I do?” Jaxon asked.

  “I don’t know. Nothing. If the police see you here, they will arrest you.”

  If the police see me here, they’ll arrest me just as quickly, Jaxon thought, taking a nervous look around.

  The police truck passed by again. It drove slowly, the men inside studying the crowd, obviously looking for someone.

  Looking for her.

  Jaxon stepped into a doorway, ignoring someone nearby staring at the locally dressed woman speaking English, and asked, “Did they capture Nadya and Dimitri?”

  “No. The police are looking for them, but I think they are gone. It is the Russian ambassador I am worried about. He
will be angry that some of his people have been killed, and he will want the government to punish us.”

  Jaxon ground her teeth. All she wanted was to find her place in the world, and now she was ending up a burden to her people. Before she could think of something to say, Hawa Ndiaye went on.

  “There are some more strangers here.”

  “Oh no, now what?” Jaxon sighed. The last thing they needed was even more trouble.

  “I don’t know for sure. They are Atlanteans, or at least they look like the People of the Sea. They are strange, though. They wear local clothes but do not act like locals. From what I hear, only one of them speaks Arabic and speaks it like a foreigner. The rest do not talk to anyone.”

  “Wait, foreigners who are Atlanteans? Where are they from? What are they doing there?”

  “I don’t know. They haven’t contacted any of us. They were seen in the market asking questions. They visited the manuscript museum as well. I don’t know more.”

  Jaxon dared a look out of the doorway. The police truck had stopped at an intersection, and one of the officers had stepped out to speak with a man leading a camel. The man pointed back in the direction Jaxon had come. Back in the direction of the clothing shop.

  Great, Jaxon thought. I’m going to get even more people in trouble.

  I need to watch it, or I’ll be next.

  “Look, Hawa, I need to go. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Before her friend could say more, Jaxon hung up. She waited until the police officer got back in the truck and drove off toward the clothing shop before she stepped out of the doorway. Now several people were staring, and she realized she had been behaving suspiciously.

  She couldn’t stay here. Her disguise had bought her some time, but sooner or later, they’d find her.

  Jaxon headed for the square where the buses gathered. Dialing the Atlantis Allegiance one more time and still getting no answer, she hurried toward a cluster of rattling old buses. People piled on, jamming the insides, while some even climbed onto the roof. In front of each bus, a young man called out the destinations. Most meant nothing to her, but she saw one rusty heap packed with people with a man standing at the door shouting, “Timbuktu! Timbuktu!”